In 1963, General Dynamics Astronautics asked politicians, scientists, and military commanders to speculate on the potential state of the world in 2063, recording all these speculations in a book, and sealing it in a time capsule that was lost during the demolition of the General Dynamics Astronautics building. Thankfully, the entirety of the book is available as a download thanks to the fine folks at Paleo-Future. Found Via.
posted on Apr 14, 2008 - View this thread

40 Years in the Future - Another "what will life look like in the future" article. This one from Mechanix Illustrated, 1968. (via Boing Boing)
posted on Mar 24, 2008 - View this thread

The Cabinet Office in the UK has published "Future Strategic Challenges for Britain" [full pdf, summary pdf, website], a 180-page document which summarises current futures thinking in the UK Government, with a horizon of about 20 years. It includes predictions on big issues such as democratic participation, foreign affairs, climate change, family life and public services.
posted on Feb 8, 2008 - View this thread

The Middleton Family at the New York World's Fair (1939). The Original Futurama. Featuring Elektro, the Smoking Robot.
posted on Dec 12, 2007 - View this thread

In 2008, China will fail to ride the Olympics wave and improve its worldwide image, the US will vote mainly on health (barring a terrorist attack or a recession), usher in a period of pragmatic caution and toast to it over a nice Merlot, the culture wars will go global, Israel may decide that it must act alone against Iran, African gangs will prosper, UK politics will be re-established as a spectator sport, we will finally quit oil - and want yet more of it, the potato will make a comeback, an island will be moved for the sake of the Euro, we will rush to give for free what others charge for, U will HAV CASH, robots will explore the seas of Earth, which is round, by the way, pigs will fly, and we will like totally love it (don't we?).

The Economist: The World in 2008.
posted on Nov 28, 2007 - View this thread

Why science fiction is hard. Inspired by reports of a creative new, Rube-Goldberg spamming technique in World of Warcraft, MetaFilter's own Charlie Stross imagines trying to explain gold farming to someone from 1977. (Previously: 1, 2, 3)
posted on Jul 20, 2007 - View this thread

Paleo-Future: A look into the future that never was. More recent predictions include the future according to AT&T, Apple's Knowledge Navigator and Bill Gates on the Future of Police Work.
posted on Apr 28, 2007 - View this thread

In the year 1900, Ladies Home Journal writer John Elfreth Watkins Jr wrote an article entitled What May Happen In The Next 100 Years". This is apparently what the most learned, conservative men of the "greatest institutions of science and learning" had to say about the coming hundred years.
posted on Apr 19, 2007 - View this thread

In 2007 there will be lots of anniversaries, the web will keep killing the television star, the popcorn will taste familiar, humankind will come closer still to achieving immortality, and text messaging will conquer Africa. And although the spread of democracy is stalling (don't worry however - the Swedes still win (pdf)), it's still down to George Bush.

The Economist: The World in 2007.
posted on Dec 2, 2006 - View this thread

Much of the “jobs of the future” rhetoric surrounding the eagerness to end shop class and get every warm body into college, thence into a cubicle, implicitly assumes that we are heading to a “post-industrial” economy in which everyone will deal only in abstractions. Yet trafficking in abstractions is not the same as thinking...
posted on Sep 7, 2006 - View this thread

Can you prove it didn't happen? Best known for his work on Plan 9 from Outer Space, the Amazing Criswell had quite a career outside of his rare appearances in film. The spit-curled, stentorian psychic had a penchant for bizarre predictions, was the source for music by Mae West, and inspired some damned interesting writing.
posted on Apr 11, 2006 - View this thread

Look...look into the LCD Ball. Divine the great spirits of tech and gaze into 2006. The new year is only a few days away, how hard is it to guess into next week?
posted on Dec 29, 2005 - View this thread

Everybody's an expert, but does expertise promote better predictions?
posted on Dec 1, 2005 - View this thread

Noted in the live stream from this TV station This is the "Local2 News" live tv stream (which has been pointed to in three previous MeFi threads about other news stories. Currently they've from time to time been showing storm track predictive models (which they say are their own development). I'd rather have pointers to more models than the TV station's occasional glimpses, but, this is the most varied set of storm track predictions I've seen. Anyone know where they're getting them?
posted on Sep 22, 2005 - View this thread

The sky is falling! From Romulus to Ronald Reagan: a comprehensive timeline of apocalyptic predictions. If you decide to put some stock in one or more of these prophecies, you may need to do some preparatory research.
posted on Jun 22, 2005 - View this thread

PopaPOOLooza – a capitalistic approach to Popapalooza (discussed here).
posted on Apr 9, 2005 - View this thread

What's hot in technogeekery? Match your predictions with Yahoo's ongoing search stats using $10,000 fake dollars as investment capital. Is this how Yahoo is going to steal Google's mindshare - or just another pointless thing to do with search engines?
posted on Apr 4, 2005 - View this thread

Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project. Explore alternative futures, by creating own scenarios for global changes within the next 15 years.
posted on Jan 14, 2005 - View this thread

Robert X cringely's tech predictions for 2005 Discuss.
posted on Jan 10, 2005 - View this thread

There's still time for some of these 2004 predictions to come true, but not much. For those of us who like schadenfreude (pleasure at another's mis-fortune, har): the paranormal survey, the pet psychic, the banal, the faith-based.
posted on Dec 28, 2004 - View this thread

Predicting 2004.
posted on Dec 23, 2004 - View this thread

Gates talks about our future. Bill gates shows a side that is rarely seen by computer users. Love him or hate him, I just want to know why he doesn't want me to have one of these some time in the next 15 years too.
posted on Jul 13, 2004 - View this thread

Why Stock Markets Crash : Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems. Professor Didier Sornette of UCLA has some very interesting things to say about stock markets. In his book, he explains how his "theory of cooperative herding and imitation [...] has detected the existence of a clear signature of herding in the decay of the US S&P500 index since August 2000 with high statistical significance, in the form of strong log-periodic components." Although his timing has been just a bit early, the theory, the predictions to date and the pictures are all pretty uncanny. This is easily the most interesting book on the stock market I have ever read and provides interesting and believable hypotheses about things I never imagined could have rigorous explanations. For an overview, here is an interview with the author.
posted on May 14, 2004 - View this thread

Quake to hit LA "by September 5," predicts a geophysicist at UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. Some skeptical, while others say it's not junk science.
posted on Apr 15, 2004 - View this thread

Robert X. Cringely's Predictions for 2004 : first he updates readers on his 2003 predictions (80% accuracy) and then dishings 15 new techie prophecies.
posted on Jan 2, 2004 - View this thread

A better 2004? A mixed look at what Indian and Chinese astrologers see for the new year. We're soon to move into the Chinese year of the monkey, a symbol of revolution, movement and changes... a year of more conflict and disharmony in international relationship but there are good chances of seeing new light and brighter future after struggles.
But on the brighter(ish) side, Stargazers agree that the coming 12 months cannot fare much worse than the seesaw ride that the world went through in 2003, dogged by war in Iraq, fluctuating financial markets and mysterious diseases.
posted on Jan 1, 2004 - View this thread

Aids in Africa - you know the facts right? Well perhaps not, what you know are the predictions of a Computer Model. Rian Malan in today's Spectator highlights how alarmingly inaccurate such models are proving. Paul Henman illustrates how common it is to build political assumptions into a model and then hide them under layers of complexity and apparent objectivity. Think global warming. How do we challenge the models that increasingly determine our opinions and priorities?
posted on Dec 12, 2003 - View this thread

A vision of the future? "Although there is debate over the exact date it started, on November 02, 2000, a person calling themselves Timetravel_0, and later John Titor, started posting on a public forum that he was a time traveler from the year 2036." What follows are tales of the "future" involving civil and global nuclear war, schematics for a "time machine", and an IBM 5100 computer from 1974. (Grain of salt not included.)
posted on Sep 10, 2003 - View this thread

Airplanes, movies, guided missiles, submarines, the electric chair, air conditioning , the fax machine - in 1870 " Alvin Toffler, John Naisbitt, Faith Popcorn: all of them famous prognosticators. Yet each comes off a piker when compared to the true master of industrial clairvoyance, Jules Verne."
posted on Apr 1, 2002 - View this thread

Long Bets. SCOTTSDALE, Ariz.--In 28 years, commercial airline passengers will routinely fly in pilotless airplanes. Sound ludicrous? Not to Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Craig Mundie, who recently bet Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt $2,000 that the prediction will come true. This site is all about, well long bets. Oh, and it's all for charity.
posted on Mar 26, 2002 - View this thread

Like tarot or astrology in that it's a tool for introspection, only without the occult trappings. Kinda fun to play with, though. Or maybe not. (Warning: annoying The Weakest Linkesque music.)
posted on Mar 5, 2002 - View this thread

A Brief History of the Apocalypse
posted on Feb 26, 2002 - View this thread

"I'm ashamed I've done so little," said Senator Jesse Helms who expressed regret that he hadn't done more during his tenure to fight the global spread of AIDS and HIV. Lame ducks are the strangest animals of all.
posted on Feb 21, 2002 - View this thread

That game is tomorrow. But any predictions on the final outcome? I couldn't find any previous years predictions and how close some guesses were, but the only link of note was this. 31-28.
posted on Feb 2, 2002 - View this thread

The editor of CBS Marketwatch predicts that Enron is not Bush's Whitewater; it's worse. "Don't expect to see either Bush or Vice President Cheney directly linked to the financial shenanigans that brought Enron down. They won't be.... Enron won't bring down Bush.... But it will be a major thorn in his side through the rest of this presidential term, and it might even play a role in the next election, depending on what comes out." (via Drudge)
posted on Jan 10, 2002 - View this thread

Humans Doomed Without Space Colonies. The human race is likely to be wiped out by a doomsday virus before this millennium is out unless it starts to colonize space, top British scientist Stephen Hawking warned on Tuesday.
posted on Oct 16, 2001 - View this thread

Anyone else remember Wired's theory of The Long Boom from 1997? I guess they were wrong.
posted on Sep 30, 2001 - View this thread

The Dead Zone all over again? Lucich said the boy approached his teacher on the afternoon of Sept. 10 and casually told her: "Tomorrow, World War III will begin. It will begin in the United States, and the United States will lose." eerie little story about a 5th grader in Dallas
posted on Sep 20, 2001 - View this thread

Have we entered a Neil Howe and William Strauss have written a series of books (really, the same book rehashed three times, but who's counting?) on generational cycles. Their theory is that we are due for a "fourth turning" in the first part of the 21st century: a catalyst event that causes an extreme change in public mood, causing us to go through a decade or two of crisis. For example, the 1929 stock market crash was a catalyst, and the Depression and WWII were the time of crisis. Was 9/11 such a catalyst?
posted on Sep 15, 2001 - View this thread

Doggie-bag use is up - Must be an economic downturn (via Fark). Want to know what the Fed is up to before everyone else? Have a look at the Greenspan briefcase theory. Takeout orders in Washington DC are up? Must be a war!

Anyone know of other 'indicators' like these? No, Groundhog Day doesn't count.
posted on Aug 28, 2001 - View this thread

Miracles of the Next Fifty Years -- a reprint of an article from the February 1950 issue of Popular Mechanics. At times laughably naive, other times pretty accurate (the author predicts that cancer won't be cured by 2000, but it won't be far off), it's a fun piece of George-Jetson-meets-Ozzie-and-Harriet gee-whizness.
posted on Jun 2, 2001 - View this thread

"I think it's dead. I think it's over with; it's gone. There is no long-term prognosis. The patient has died. There is no future." That's the web as content medium he's talking about. [more inside]
posted on Feb 3, 2001 - View this thread

Predictions from an Icelandic prophet for 2001: Total war in the Middle East, a worldwide natural disaster, money market instability, the spread of mad cow disease, and oh yeah - an Oscar for Bjork. I'm not sure what to comment on; what safe bets these are, or the interesting addition of Oscar picks in the predictions.
posted on Jan 2, 2001 - View this thread

"Ferociously proud and somewhat vain, you like to be impressive and seen as Somebody Special." It's George W. Bush's natal horoscope, interpreted by some anonymous folks at Astrozine/iVillage. The many screenfuls include this statement: "An innate clairvoyant tendency could also be developed quite easily by you." Via the frequently wonderful Guardian Weblog.
posted on Dec 14, 2000 - View this thread

Remember the MetaFilter election contest? Well, it seems we finally have a winner. Thanks rcade for the great contest!
posted on Dec 13, 2000 - View this thread

Bush narrowly defeats Gore by 26 electors and 0.1 percent of the popular vote. That's the average of 14 predictions in the Washington Post. I thought it would be interesting to see how MetaFilter's pundits fare in predicting the Electoral Count and popular vote, so I'm offering a bribe ...
posted on Nov 6, 2000 - View this thread

One of the holy grails of the infosaturated overworking computer professionals like myself is a single food capable of giving all the nutrients you'd need for a meal, and be as easy as possible to prepare and eat. Some friends used to call this dream creation "food paste" or "foodstuff capsules" or most simply "fuel." I never thought my Jetsonian dream would ever come true, but now there's the Dilberito, with 100% of 23 vitamins and Jamba Juice's Smoothies. Why do I mention Jamba? Because I saw this poster in the SFO airport last night, and they even go so far as to answer the question "can I get too much Jamba?"
posted on Mar 6, 2000 - View this thread